Princeton ready to battle FDU

By
Nick Peruffo, The Trentonian

Friday, December 6, 2013

PRINCETON — If the previous two weeks are any guide, Princeton’s opponent this Saturday may just be the most dangerous program in New Jersey.

No, neither of the state’s major conference entries — Seton Hall and Rutgers — will be on their way to Jadwin Gym (though the Tigers will travel to Piscataway Dec. 11). Instead, it will be Fairleigh Dickinson — the team that got the Garden State talking with consecutive upset victories over the Scarlet Knights and Pirates — that will try to disrupt Princeton’s recent positive trend.

“Their coach, Greg Herenda, I think he is doing a really good job,” said Princeton coach Mitch Henderson, on the challenge FDU poses. “They like to press and they change defenses up.”

Offensively, the Knights are led by 5-foot-11 dynamo Sidney Sanders Jr., who is averaging 18.5 points and 5.6 assists per game. Sanders has also shown a dangerous ability to rise to big occasions, scoring 22 with 10 assists against Rutgers and 23 with nine assists against Seton Hall.

“He’s good, and he makes winning plays,” Henderson said. “Anytime you have a really good guard you are going to be good.”

FDU’s two-game run through New Jersey was particularly surprising considering that overall, the Knights remain just 3-7 with bad loses to the likes of Hofstra, St. Peter’s and Norfolk State. Heading into the season, they were considered one of the worst teams in all of Division I college basketball.

Still, those two wins put the state on notice.

“I definitely had a lot of texts and phone calls from friends in the area saying ‘are they the best team in New Jersey?,” said freshman Spencer Weisz, who attended Seton Hall Prep and grew up in Florham Park. “It appears that way after beating Seton Hall and Rutgers.”

Henderson, naturally, dismissed any talk of a “New Jersey state championship,” but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t think beating in-state programs like FDU is important.

“I would love to get the very best players out of New Jersey all the time, and being really good means you are more attractive to in-state kids,” he said. “We have a good rivalry with Rutgers, and this FDU thing is a little newer, but we try to win every game.”

Being the team’s only Garden State native, however, Weisz was willing to address the question a little more head-on.

“Between that game and our game at Rutgers, there will be a lot of bragging rights on the line,” he said. “Bragging rights, they mean something to a lot of people in the state, because there are a lot of alumni that come back and watch the games. We obviously want to represent them as best we can.”

While the Tigers are ultimately after something more substantive than the arbitrary title of New Jersey’s best team, beating FDU would certainly be another step in the right direction.